Pandemic: Tracking Contagions, from Cholera to Coronaviruses and Beyond

by Sonia Shah

One study found that more than 6 percent of poultry workers harbored antibodies to H7N9, despite having no history of suffering an infection.

It’s also because our deeply rooted, highly nuanced capacity for cooperative action failed.

But the Manhattan Company’s expansive charter made it untouchable. It had been granted its rights and auxiliary powers in perpetuity.17

As even his rival Alexander Hamilton had to admit, the Manhattan Company was “a very convenient instrument of profit and influence,” albeit “a perfect monster in its principles.”21 (Hamilton’s incisive commentary offended Burr, who challenged Hamilton to a duel. On

Today the company that poisoned New York City with cholera is known as JPMorgan Chase, the largest bank in the United States and the second largest in the world.23

Nelson Manfred Blake.26 Like the Manhattan Company’s rotten system, rather than prevent the spread of cholera, these badly designed, poorly maintained systems helped to more efficiently distribute it.

They could have implemented quarantine. The first one had been enacted by Venice in 1374, when the city’s gates and ports were shut for forty days to keep out bubonic plague (thus deriving the method’s name, from quarante giorni or “forty days” in Italian).

The business losses incurred under quarantine were “calamitous,” according to the physician Daniel Drake.33 “Quarantine is useless,” added the British physician Henry Gaulter in 1833, “and the injury it inflicts on the commercial relations and maritime intercourse of the country is an absolute and uncompensated evil.”

Charles Maclean, in 1824, titled his diatribe against quarantines, or rather “engines of despotism,” Evils of Quarantine Laws, and Non-Existence of Pestilential Contagion.36

if a “respectable” person did die of cholera, medical experts argued that he or she must have had some secret vice.)39

“It appears to be abundantly settled,” Beck reported, “that cholera cannot be kept out of a country by quarantine laws.”44

While the surgeon general didn’t bother warning the public about the risks of travel to cholera-stricken Italy, in private correspondence he advised his personal acquaintances to cancel their plans to visit Italy that summer.

Death in Venice,

called Middle East respiratory syndrome

The man who may have prevented a pandemic lost his job and had to relocate to Egypt.

“It is not difficult to make microbes resistant to penicillin in the laboratory by exposing them to concentrations not sufficient to kill them, and the same thing has occasionally happened in the body. The time may come,” he went on, presciently,

Farmers profited by giving antibiotics to their livestock, which for reasons that are still unclear made them grow faster and helped them thrive in factory farms.

“Fleming’s warning,” one microbiologist writes, “has fallen on ears deafened by the sound of falling money.”65

the FDA issued a set of voluntary guidelines on antibiotic use in livestock,

To make up the budgetary shortfall, the WHO started to turn to private finance, collecting so-called voluntary contributions from private philanthropies, companies, and NGOs, as well as donor countries. In 1970, these voluntary contributions accounted for a quarter of the agency’s budget.

Thus the WHO’s activities, the agency’s director-general Margaret Chan admitted in an interview with The New York Times, are no longer driven by global health priorities but rather by donor interests.

As an internal document leaked to the Associated Press revealed, they refused to acknowledge the epidemic until it was too late to contain.

Bruce Aylward, admitted in the fall of 2014 that WHO’s actions ended up “compromising” the effort to control the Ebola epidemic rather than aiding it.

Today it’s the privately run Gates Foundation that sets the global health agenda, not the WHO. In 2007, the foundation announced that resources should be devoted to the eradication of malaria,

When the agency’s malaria director, Arata Kochi, dared to publicly question it, he was promptly put on “gardening leave,” as one malaria scientist put it, never to be heard from again.

We’ve ceded control to them and now we must simply hope that they are good. Our ability to mount a cooperative defense against the next pandemic depends on it.

Unlike acts of war or catastrophic storms, pandemic-causing pathogens don’t build trust and facilitate cooperative defenses. On the contrary, due to the peculiar psychic experience of new pathogens, they’re more likely to breed suspicion and mistrust among us, destroying social bonds as surely as they destroy bodies.

the UN had hired soldiers from cholera-struck Nepal, whom they could pay a fraction of what the United States paid its own soldiers, and it was these soldiers who had introduced cholera into Haiti.

In ancient Syria, female goats designated as the vehicle of evil were decorated with silver and driven out into the wastelands to die alone during royal weddings. The word “scapegoat”

in which God commands Aaron to sacrifice two goats for the Day of Atonement. One was to be slaughtered. The other goat, for “Azazel,” was to be symbolically laden with all of the transgressions of the Israelites and then sent out into the desert to perish alone.

“The bloody scenes did not end until well into the night,” the historian William J. Callahan notes.16

The particular immigrant groups blamed for cholera’s spread varied over the decades. In the 1830s and 1840s, it was the Irish.

Investigators unearthed the workers’ smashed and bullet-riddled skulls from a mass grave in 2009.22

In the 1850s, the wave of violence that followed cholera crashed upon Muslims, in particular, pilgrims on Hajj. Muslim religious stricture requires that all practitioners perform the Hajj pilgrimage to Arafat, about twelve miles east of the Saudi Arabian city of Mecca, at least once in their lives.23 As the pace of international trade and shipping picked up, so did the number of Hajjis. In 1831, 112,000 pilgrims participated in Hajj; by 1910, an estimated 300,000 did.24 Cholera outbreaks followed as well. In one of the worst outbreaks, in 1865, cholera killed fifteen thousand Hajj pilgrims.

“Mecca, I hold, is the place of danger for Europe,” the British doctor W. J. Simpson put it,

Nevertheless, when West Nile virus arrived in New York City in 1999, government officials were quick to suspect a bioterror attack at the hands of the hated Iraqi president Saddam Hussein.

55 In 2011, the Central Intelligence Agency had used a sham hepatitis B vaccination campaign as a cover to collect information that led to the assassination of Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden in Pakistan.56

This claim is as exaggerated and conspiratorial as was the claim that doctors killed people with cholera to dissect their bodies in the nineteenth century, or that the polio vaccine is designed to sterilize Muslims. It’s plainly contradicted by the facts.

the MMR vaccine and autism has been widely debunked and was withdrawn by the journal that published it. Plus, a 2013 study found that autism can be effectively detected in children at the age of six months, well before any would have been vaccinated against measles,

Corporate influence on vaccine promotion is relatively slim. Indeed, drug companies have considered vaccines so unprofitable that during the 1990s and 2000s, many abandoned the vaccine business altogether.

Without herd immunity, pathogens can infect both unvaccinated people and those who can’t be vaccinated, like infants.

Depending on who did the adjudicating, that group of “responsible” people could have included health-care workers in Guinea in 2014, gay people in the United States in the 1980s, and Irish immigrants in New York City in the 1830s.

is, perhaps, the most potent one of all. We can develop specific tools to destroy or arrest them with surgical precision, tools that can be effectively used by any individual with access to them, with no elaborate cooperative effort required. Those tools, of course, are medicines.

First, though, those cures have to be developed.

“confirmation bias” and “change blindness.”

They also fail to notice anomalies that contradict their expectations,

His student, the doctor and philosopher John Locke, wrote that attempting to learn about disease by examining the body through microscopy was like trying to tell time by peering into the interior of a clock.7

James Lind

He’s lauded today for conducting the first clinical trial.

philosophically wrongheaded as ripping a scab is today.